2008年11月29日 星期六

100 Notable Books of 2008

每年看紐約時報的年度百本好書單
我們可能只好自嘆自己活在另外的世界

Holiday Books

100 Notable Books of 2008


Published: November 26, 2008

The Book Review has selected this list from books reviewed since Dec. 2, 2007, when we published our previous Notables list.

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Illustration by Paul Cox

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The best of this year's gift books, classical music CD's, boxed sets, video games and DVD's, chosen by our critics.

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Fiction & Poetry

AMERICAN WIFE. By Curtis Sittenfeld. (Random House, $26.) The life of this novel’s heroine — a first lady who comes to realize, at the height of the Iraq war, that she has compromised her youthful ideals — is conspicuously modeled on that of Laura Bush.

ATMOSPHERIC DISTURBANCES. By Rivka Galchen. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) The psychiatrist-narrator of this brainy, whimsical first novel believes that his beautiful, much-younger Argentine wife has been replaced by an exact double.

BASS CATHEDRAL. By Nathaniel Mackey. (New Directions, paper, $16.95.) Mackey’s fictive world is an insular one of musicians composing, playing and talking jazz in the private language of their art.

BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN. By Charles Bock. (Random House, $25.) This bravura first novel, set against a corruptly compelling Las Vegas landscape, revolves around the disappearance of a surly 12-year-old boy.

BEIJING COMA. By Ma Jian. Translated by Flora Drew. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.50.) Ma’s novel, an important political statement, looks at China through the life of a dissident paralyzed at Tiananmen Square.

A BETTER ANGEL: Stories. By Chris Adrian. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.) For Adrian — who is both a pediatrician and a divinity student — illness and a heightened spiritual state are closely related conditions.

BLACK FLIES. By Shannon Burke. (Soft Skull, paper, $14.95.) A rookie paramedic in New York City is overwhelmed by the horrors of his job in this arresting, confrontational novel, informed by Burke’s five years of experience on city ambulances.

THE BLUE STAR. By Tony Earley. (Little, Brown, $23.99.) The caring, thoughtful hero of Earley’s engrossing first novel, “Jim the Boy,” is now 17 and confronting not only the eternal turmoil of love, but also venality and the frightening calls of duty and war.

THE BOAT. By Nam Le. (Knopf, $22.95.) In the opening story of Le’s first collection, a blocked writer succumbs to the easy temptations of “ethnic lit.”

BREATH. By Tim Winton. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.) Surfing offers this darkly exhilarating novel’s protagonist an escape from a drab Australian town.

DANGEROUS LAUGHTER: Thirteen Stories. By Steven Millhauser. (Knopf, $24.) In his latest collection, Millhauser advances his chosen themes — the slippery self, the power of hysterical young people — with even more confidence and power than before.

DEAR AMERICAN AIRLINES. By Jonathan Miles. (Houghton Mifflin, $22.) Miles’s fine first novel takes the form of a letter from a stranded traveler, his life a compilation of regrets, who uses the time to digress on an impressive array of cultural issues, large and small.

DIARY OF A BAD YEAR. By J. M. Coet­zee. (Viking, $24.95.) Coetzee follows the late career of one Señor C, who, like Coetzee himself, is a South African writer transplanted to Australia and the author of a novel titled “Waiting for the Barbarians.”

DICTATION: A Quartet. By Cynthia Ozick. (Houghton Mifflin, $24.) In the title story of this expertly turned collection, Henry James and Joseph Conrad embody Ozick’s polarity of art and ardor.

ELEGY: Poems. By Mary Jo Bang. (Graywolf, $20.) Grief is converted into art in this bleak, forthright collection, centered on the death of the poet’s son.

THE ENGLISH MAJOR. By Jim Harrison. (Grove, $24.) A 60-year-old cherry farmer and former English teacher — an inversion of the classic Harrison hero — sets out on a trip west after being dumped by his wife.

FANON. By John Edgar Wideman. (Houghton Mifflin, $24.) Wideman’s novel — raw and astringent, yet with a high literary polish — explores the life of the psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon.

THE FINDER. By Colin Harrison. (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) A New York thriller, played out against the nasty world of global capitalism.

FINE JUST THE WAY IT IS: Wyoming Stories 3 . By Annie Proulx. (Scribner, $25.) These rich, bleak stories offer an American West in which the natural elements are murderous and folks aren’t much better.

THE GOOD THIEF . By Hannah Tinti. (Dial, $25.) In Tinti’s first novel, set in mid-19th-century New England, a con man teaches an orphan the art of the lie.

HALF OF THE WORLD IN LIGHT: New and Selected Poems. By Juan Felipe Herrera. (University of Arizona, paper, $24.95.) Herrera, known for portrayals of Chicano life, is unpredictable and wildly inventive.

HIS ILLEGAL SELF. By Peter Carey. (Knopf, $25.) In this enthralling novel, a boy goes underground with a defiant hippie indulging her maternal urge.

HOME. By Marilynne Robinson. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) Revisiting the events of her novel “Gilead” from another perspective, Robinson has written an anguished pastoral, at once bitter and joyful.

INDIGNATION. By Philip Roth. (Houghton Mifflin, $26.) Marcus Messner is a sophomore at a small, conservative Ohio college at the time of the Korean War. The novel he narrates, like Roth’s last two, is ruthlessly economical and relentlessly deathbound.

THE LAZARUS PROJECT. By Aleksandar Hemon. (Riverhead, $24.95.) This novel’s despairing immigrant protagonist becomes intrigued with the real-life killing of a presumed anarchist in Chicago in 1908.

LEGEND OF A SUICIDE. By David Vann. (University of Massachusetts, $24.95.) In his first story collection, Vann leads the reader to vital places while exorcizing demons born from the suicide of his father.

LIFE CLASS. By Pat Barker. (Doubleday, $23.95.) Barker’s new novel, about a group of British artists overtaken by World War I, concentrates more on the turmoil of love than on the trauma of war.

LUSH LIFE. By Richard Price. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) Chandler — and Bellow, too — peeps out from Price’s novel, in which an aspiring writer cum restaurant manager, mugged in the gentrifying Lower East Side of Manhattan, himself becomes a suspect.

A MERCY. By Toni Morrison. (Knopf, $23.95.) Summoning voices from the 17th century, Morrison performs her deepest excavation yet into America’s history and exhumes the country’s twin original sins: the importation of African slaves and the near extermination of Native Americans.

MODERN LIFE: Poems . By Matthea Harvey. (Graywolf, paper, $14.) Harvey is willing to take risks, and her reward is that richest, rarest thing, genuine poetry.

A MOST WANTED MAN . By John le Carré. (Scribner, $28.) This powerful novel, centered on a half-Russian, half-Chechen, half-crazy fugitive in Germany, swims with operatives whose desperation to avert another 9/11 provokes a slow-­burning fire in every line.

MY REVOLUTIONS. By Hari Kunzru. (Dutton, $25.95.) Kunzru’s third novel is an extraordinary autumnal depiction of a failed ’60s radical.

NETHERLAND. By Joseph O’Neill. (Pantheon, $23.95.) In the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction yet about post-9/11 New York and London, the game of cricket provides solace to a man whose family disintegrates after the attacks.

OPAL SUNSET: Selected Poems, 1958-2008. By Clive James. (Norton, $25.95.) James, a staunch formalist, is firmly situated in the sociable, plain-spoken tradition that runs from Auden through Larkin.

THE OTHER. By David Guterson. (Knopf, $24.95.) In this novel from the author of “Snow Falling on Cedars,” a schoolteacher nourishes a friendship with a privileged recluse.

OUR STORY BEGINS: New and Selected Stories. By Tobias Wolff. (Knopf, $26.95.) Some of Wolff’s best work is concentrated here, revealing his gift for evoking the breadth of American experience.

THE ROAD HOME. By Rose Tremain. (Little, Brown, $24.99.) A widowed Russian emigrant, fearfully navigating the strange city of London, learns that his home village is about to be inundated.

THE SACRED BOOK OF THE WEREWOLF. By Victor Pelevin. Translated by Andrew Bromfield. (Viking, $25.95.) A supernatural call girl narrates Pelevin’s satirical allegory of post-Soviet, post-9/11 Russia.

THE SCHOOL ON HEART’S CONTENT ROAD. By Carolyn Chute. (Atlantic Monthly, $24.) In Chute’s first novel in nearly 10 years, disparate characters cluster around an off-the-grid communal settlement.

SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT: A New Verse Translation. By Simon Armitage. (Norton, $25.95.) One of the eerie, exuberant joys of Middle English poetry, in an alliterative rendering that captures the original’s drive, dialect and landscape.

SLEEPING IT OFF IN RAPID CITY: Poems, New and Selected. By August Kleinzahler. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) Kleinzahler seeks the true heart of places, whether repellent, beautiful or both at once.

TELEX FROM CUBA. By Rachel Kushner. (Scribner, $25.) In this multilayered first novel, inter­national drifters try to bury pasts that include murder, adultery and neurotic meltdown, even as the Castro brothers gather revolutionaries in the hills.

2666. By Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, cloth and paper, $30.) The five autonomous sections of this posthumously published novel interlock to form an astonishing whole, a supreme capstone to Bolaño’s vaulting ambition.

UNACCUSTOMED EARTH. By Jhumpa Lahiri. (Knopf, $25.) In eight sensitive stories, Lahiri evokes the anxiety, excitement and transformations felt by Bengali immigrants and their American children.

THE UNFORTUNATES. By B. S. Johnson. (New Directions, $24.95.) This novel, first published in 1969, dovetails theme (the accidents of memory) with eccentric form (unbound chapters to be read in any order).

WHEN WILL THERE BE GOOD NEWS? By Kate Atkinson. (Little, Brown, $24.99.) Jackson Brodie, the hero of Atkinson’s previous literary thrillers, takes the case of a mother and baby who suddenly disappear.

THE WIDOWS OF EASTWICK. By John Updike. (Knopf, $24.95.) In this ingenious sequel to “The Witches of Eastwick,” the three title characters, old ladies now, renew their sisterhood, return to their old hometown and contrive to atone for past crimes.

YESTERDAY’S WEATHER. By Anne Enright. (Grove, $24.) Working-class Irish characters grapple with love, marriage, confusion and yearning in Enright’s varied, if somewhat disenchanted, stories.


Nonfiction

AMERICAN LION: Andrew Jackson in the White House . By Jon Meacham. (Random House, $30.) Meacham, the editor of Newsweek, discerns a democratic dignity in the seventh president’s populism.

ANGLER: The Cheney Vice Presidency. By Barton Gellman. (Penguin Press, $27.95.) An engrossing portrait of Dick Cheney as a master political manipulator.

BACARDI AND THE LONG FIGHT FOR CUBA: The Biography of a Cause. By Tom Gjelten. (Viking, $27.95.) An NPR correspondent paints a vivid portrait of the anti-Castro clan behind the liquor empire.

THE BIG SORT: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart. By Bill Bishop with Robert G. Cushing. (Houghton Mifflin, $25.) A journalist and a statistician see political dangers in the country’s increasing tendency to separate into solipsistic blocs.

BLOOD MATTERS: From Inherited Illness to Designer Babies, How the World and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene. By Masha Gessen. (Harcourt, $25.) Hard choices followed Gessen’s discovery that she carries a dangerous genetic mutation.

CAPITOL MEN: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen. By Philip Dray. (Houghton Mifflin, $30.) A collective biography of the pioneers of black political involvement.

THE CHALLENGE: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Fight Over Presidential Power. By Jonathan Mahler. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) An objective, thorough study of a landmark case for Guantánamo detainees.

CHAMPLAIN’S DREAM. By David Hackett Fischer. (Simon & Schuster, $40.) Fischer argues that France’s North Ameri­can colonial success was attributable largely to one remarkable man, Samuel de Champlain.

CHASING THE FLAME: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World. By Samantha Power. (Penguin Press, $32.95.) Vieira de Mello, who was killed in Iraq in 2003, embodied both the idealism and the limitations of the United Nations, which he served long and loyally.

CONDOLEEZZA RICE. An American Life: A Biography. By Elisabeth Bumiller. (Random House, $27.95.) A New York Times reporter casts a keen eye on Rice’s tenure as a policy maker, her close ties to George Bush, and her personal and professional past.

THE DARK SIDE: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals. By Jane Mayer. (Doubleday, $27.50.) A New Yorker writer recounts the emergence of the widespread use of torture as a central tool in the fight against terrorism.

DELTA BLUES: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music. By Ted Gioia. (Norton, $27.95.) Gioia’s survey balances the story of the music with that of its reception.

DESCARTES’ BONES: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason. By Russell Shorto. (Doubleday, $26.) Shorto’s smart, elegant study turns the early separation of Descartes’s skull from the rest of his remains into an irresistible metaphor.

DREAMS AND SHADOWS: The Future of the Middle East. By Robin Wright. (Penguin Press, $26.95.) This fluent and intelligent book describes the struggles of people from Morocco to Iran to reform or replace long-entrenched national regimes.

THE DRUNKARD’S WALK: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. By Leonard Mlodinow. (Pantheon, $24.95.) This breezy crash course intersperses probabilistic mind-benders with profiles of theorists.

AN EXACT REPLICA OF A FIGMENT OF MY IMAGINATION: A Memoir. By Elizabeth McCracken. (Little, Brown, $19.99.) An unstinting account of the novelist’s emotions after the stillbirth of her first child.

FACTORY GIRLS: From Village to City in a Changing China. By Leslie T. Chang. (Spiegel & Grau, $26.) Chang’s engrossing account delves deeply into the lives of young migrant workers in southern China.

THE FOREVER WAR. By Dexter Filkins. (Knopf, $25.) Filkins, a New York Times reporter who was embedded with American troops during the attack on Falluja, has written an account of the Iraq war in the tradition of Michael Herr’s “Dispatches.”

FREEDOM’S BATTLE: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention. By Gary J. Bass. (Knopf, $35.) Bass’s book is both a history and an argument for military interventions as a tool of international justice today.

A GREAT IDEA AT THE TIME: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books. By Alex Beam. (Public­Affairs, $24.95.) The minds behind a curious project that continues to exert a hold in some quarters.

HALLELUJAH JUNCTION: Composing an American Life. By John Adams. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) Adams’s wry, smart memoir stands with books by Hector Berlioz and Louis Armstrong among the most readably incisive autobiographies of major musical figures.

THE HEMINGSES OF MONTICELLO: An American Family. By Annette Gordon-Reed. (Norton, $35.) Gordon-Reed continues her study of the relationship between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson.

HOT, FLAT, AND CROWDED: Why We Need a Green Revolution — and How It Can Renew America. By Thomas L. Friedman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.95.) The Times columnist turns his attention to possible business-friendly solutions to global warming.

THE HOUSE AT SUGAR BEACH: In Search of a Lost African Childhood. By Helene Cooper. (Simon & Schuster, $25.) Cooper, a New York Times reporter who fled a warring Liberia as a child, returned to confront the ghosts of her past — and to look for a lost sister.

HOW FICTION WORKS. By James Wood. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) Concentrating on the art of the novel, the New Yorker critic presents a compact, erudite vade mecum with acute observations on individual passages and authors.

MORAL CLARITY: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists. By Susan Neiman. (Harcourt, $27.) Neiman champions Enlightenment values with no hint of over­simplification, dogmatism or misplaced piety.

THE NIGHT OF THE GUN: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life. His Own. By David Carr. (Simon & Schuster, $26.) Carr, a New York Times culture reporter, sifts through his drug- and alcohol-­addicted past.

NIXONLAND: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. By Rick Perlstein. (Scribner, $37.50.) Perlstein’s compulsively readable study holds that Nixon’s divisive and enduring legacy is the “notion that there are two kinds of Americans.”

NOTHING TO BE FRIGHTENED OF. By Julian Barnes. (Knopf, $24.95.) With no faith in an afterlife, why should an agnostic fear death? On this simple question, Barnes hangs an elegant memoir and meditation, full of a novelist’s affection for the characters who wander in and out.

NUREYEV: The Life. By Julie Kavanagh. (Pantheon, $37.50.) The son of Soviet Tatars could never get enough of anything — space, applause, money, sex — but he attracted an audience of millions to the art form he mastered.

PICTURES AT A REVOLUTION: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood. By Mark Harris. (Penguin Press, $27.95.) The best-picture nominees of 1967 were a collage of America’s psyche, and more.

THE POST-AMERICAN WORLD. By Fareed Zakaria. (Norton, $25.95.) This relentlessly intelligent examination of power focuses less on American decline than on the rise of China, trailed by India.

PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. By Dan Ariely. (Harper/HarperCollins, $25.95.) Moving comfortably from the lab to broad social questions to his own life, an M.I.T. economist pokes holes in conventional market theory.

THE RACE CARD: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse. By Richard Thompson Ford. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) Ford vivisects every sacred cow in “post-racist” America.

RETRIBUTION: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45. By Max Hastings. (Knopf, $35.) In this masterly account, Hastings describes Japanese madness eliciting American ruthlessness in the Pacific Theater.

A SECULAR AGE. By Charles Taylor. (Belknap/Harvard University, $39.95.) A philosophy professor thinks our era has been too quick to dismiss religious faith.

SHAKESPEARE’S WIFE. By Germaine Greer. (Harper/HarperCollins, $26.95.) With a polemicist’s vision and a scholar’s patience, Greer sets out to rescue Ann Hathaway from layers of biographical fantasy.

THE SUPERORGANISM: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies. By Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson. (Norton, $55.) The central conceit of this astonishing study is that an insect colony is a single animal raised to a higher level.

TELL ME HOW THIS ENDS: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq. By Linda Robinson. (Public­Affairs, $27.95.) A probing, conscientious account of strategy and tactics in post-surge Iraq.

THE TEN-CENT PLAGUE: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. By David Hajdu. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) A worthy history of the midcentury crusade against the comics industry.

THEY KNEW THEY WERE RIGHT: The Rise of the Neocons. By Jacob Heil­brunn. (Doubleday, $26.) A journalist traces the neoconservative movement from its origins at the City College of New York in the 1940s.

THIS REPUBLIC OF SUFFERING: Death and the American Civil War. By Drew Gilpin Faust. (Knopf, $27.95.) The lasting impact of the war’s immense loss of life is the subject of this extraordinary account by Harvard’s president.

THE THREE OF US: A Family Story. By Julia Blackburn. (Pantheon, $26.) Searingly and unflinchingly, Blackburn describes an appalling upbringing at the hands of her catastrophically unfit parents.

THRUMPTON HALL: A Memoir of Life in My Father’s House. By Miranda Seymour. (Harper/HarperCollins, $24.95.) Seymour’s odd and oddly affecting book instantly catapults her father into the front rank of impossible and eccentric English parents.

TRAFFIC: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us). By Tom Vanderbilt. (Knopf, $24.95.) A surprising, enlightening look at the psychology of the human beings behind the steering wheels.

THE TRILLION DOLLAR MELTDOWN: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash. By Charles R. Morris. (PublicAffairs, $22.95.) How we got into the mess we’re in, explained briefly and brilliantly.

A VOYAGE LONG AND STRANGE: Rediscovering the New World. By Tony Horwitz. (Holt, $27.50.) An accessible popular history of early America, with plenty of self-tutoring and colorful reporting.

WAKING GIANT: America in the Age of Jackson. By David S. Reynolds. (Harper/HarperCollins, $29.95.) Reynolds excels at depicting the cultural, social and intellectual currents that buffeted the nation.

WHILE THEY SLEPT: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family. By Kathryn Harrison. (Random House, $25.) Harrison’s account brings moral clarity to the dark fate of the family of Jody Gilley, who was 16 when she survived a rampage by her brother in 1984.

WHITE HEAT: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. By Brenda Wineapple. (Knopf, $27.95.) The hitherto elusive Higginson was the poet’s chosen reader, admirer and advocate.

THE WILD PLACES. By Robert Macfarlane. (Penguin, paper, $15.) Macfarlane’s unorthodox British landscapes are furrowed with human histories and haunted by literary prophets.

THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul. By Patrick French. (Knopf, $30.) French has created a monument fully worthy of its subject, elucidating the enduring but painfully asymmetrical love triangle at the core of Naipaul’s life and work.

2008年11月20日 星期四

PC Magazine Will Cease Printing a Paper Version

PC Magazine, a Flagship for Ziff Davis, Will Cease Printing a Paper Version


Published: November 19, 2008

Ziff Davis Media announced Wednesday that it was ending print publication of its 27-year-old flagship, PC Magazine, and would take the title online only.

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PC Magazine’s circulation was 1.2 million in the late 1990s.

It is the latest of several magazine publishers to drop a print edition, as advertising plummets and the cost of printing a paper version rises.

“The viability for us to continue to publish in print just isn’t there anymore,” Jason Young, chief executive of Ziff Davis, said in an interview.

While most magazines make their money mainly from print advertising, PC Magazine derives most of its profit from its Web site. More than 80 percent of the profit and about 70 percent of the revenue come from the digital business, Mr. Young said, and all of the writers and editors have been counted as part of the digital budget for two years.

The change will not require much of an adjustment, because the focus has been on getting articles to the Web first, said Lance Ulanoff, the editor of the PCMag Digital Network, which is what PCMag.com and its accompanying Web sites were renamed on Wednesday. “All content goes online first, and print has been cherry-picking for some time what it wants for the print edition,” Mr. Ulanoff said.

Circulation at PC Magazine has been declining since the late 1990s, when it hit a peak of 1.2 million. This year, the magazine’s rate base was 600,000.

Mr. Young said that while the print magazine would be profitable in 2008, he forecast that it would lose money in 2009 because of fewer advertisements and rising costs. The final print edition will be the January 2009 issue.

“Obviously, the macroeconomic condition is putting pretty significant pressure on all forms of advertising,” Mr. Young said.

Seven production, circulation and advertising employees will be cut as a result of the move, out of a total of about 140 who work on PC Magazine and PCMag.com. Mr. Young said the company was considering taking its other print magazine, the video-game publication Electronic Gaming Monthly, into an online-only format, but would not make a decision before the end of the year.

Other publishers have also moved publications online only.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a small publication that was established in 1945 and won a National Magazine Award last year, recently announced it would go online only beginning in January. “We’re trying to deal with the cost pressures,” said Jonas Siegel, the Bulletin’s editor, in an interview.

The Christian Science Monitor announced in October that it would cease printing its paper weekday edition in favor of its Web site; also in October, the Hearst Corporation closed CosmoGirl but kept its Web site.

“If you look at the list of the magazines that have gone to online, almost all of them have been magazines in trouble,” said John Fennell, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. “Magazines in general are going to be dependent on print advertising for a long time into the future,” he said.

But magazine and newspaper publishers have been contending with a decline in advertising at the same time that their costs, including ink, printing, and distribution, are rising.

Advertising pages for the December issues of monthly magazines are down more than 17 percent from the December issues of 2007, according to the Media Industry Newsletter, and that is leading to layoffs and the closing of titles.

On Tuesday, Time Inc. said that it would shut down Cottage Living, part of the Southern Progress division of Time Inc., along with the CottageLiving.com Web site. Nine of the 47 staff members will get jobs elsewhere in Time Inc., and the 38 others will be laid off, said Debra Richman, a Time Inc. spokeswoman.

2008年11月10日 星期一

Google Signs a Deal to e-Publish Out-of-Print Books

Google Signs a Deal to e-Publish Out-of-Print Books


Published: November 9, 2008

PARIS — Long after other media joined the digital revolution, book publishers clung to the reassuringly low-tech tools of printing press, paper and ink.

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European libraries have joined to produce Europeana, an online database of two million books and other cultural items.

But now the world of books is starting to go digital, too.

Last week, American authors and publishers reached an agreement with Google to settle lawsuits over Google’s Book Search program, which scans millions of books and makes their contents available on the Internet. The deal lets Google sell electronic versions of copyrighted works that have gone out of print.

“Almost overnight, not only has the largest publishing deal been struck, but the largest bookshop in the world has been built, even if it is not quite open for business yet,” wrote Neill Denny, editor of The Bookseller, a trade publication based in London, on his blog.

The settlement remains subject to court approval, and the bookshop would operate only in the United States for now. But the agreement is only one of many initiatives under which books are making what may be the biggest technological leap since Gutenberg invented moveable type.

This month, a group of European national libraries and archives plans to open Europeana, an online database of two million books and other cultural and historical items, including films, paintings, newspapers and sound recordings. Letters from Mozart to his friends, from the Austrian National Library in Vienna are there, along with early printings of his work, from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Meanwhile, publishers are moving ahead with a flurry of digital initiatives, sometimes in a race against Internet start-ups.

“The book business model is under siege, just as the music industry earlier came under siege,” said Eileen Gittins, chief executive of Blurb, a Silicon Valley company that helps people publish their own books, using the Internet. “The book publishing business has had a front-row seat to see what happened to the music industry.”

Until recently, while the music business was decimated by digital piracy, book sales rose, aided by the ability to browse and buy from online stores like Amazon.

But in the first nine months of this year, book sales in the United States fell 1.5 percent, according to the Association of American Publishers.

Among the few bright spots were sales of so-called e-books, read on devices like Amazon’s Kindle, on personal computers or on mobile phones. Wholesale sales of e-books were up 55 percent from a year earlier.

Questions remain over the best way to deliver digital books. In the United States, a surge in sales followed the introduction of the Kindle last year and upgrades in rival devices like the Sony Reader, which allow users to download books wirelessly or from an Internet-connected computer.

But in Europe, where such devices are only slowly becoming available, sales of e-books remain in their infancy. The price of these gadgets — the Kindle, for example, costs $359 — may put off readers.

In Japan, the mobile phone has been the most popular way to read e-books, according to the Digital Content Association of Japan. Sales of digital versions of manga comic books are leading the way. Penguin said it also had high hopes for selling e-books to mobile phone users in India.

About half a million people in more than 50 countries have downloaded Stanza, an application that lets them read e-books on the iPhone, said Michael Smith, executive director of the International Digital Publishing Forum in Toronto.

“The adoption is happening,” he said. “It’s not theory. It’s happening.”

A survey published in conjunction with the Frankfurt Book Fair last month showed that 40 percent of book publishing professionals thought digital sales would surpass sales of paper-and-ink books by 2018.

Now, though, revenue from e-books and other digital sources remains tiny — less than 1 percent of the worldwide sales of Penguin Group, for example, according to Genevieve Shore, digital director for Penguin in London.

But the Google deal with the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild could be a catalyst. Under the proposed settlement, Google would share online sales revenue with publishers and authors.

“We’re very excited about it,” Ms. Shore said. “What it means is that a very important player in our online lives, we’re not in conflict with anymore.”

Publishers are exploring other new ways to sell books in digital form. She said Penguin was considering subscription plans, where readers would pay a monthly fee for online access to best sellers. Another possibility would be free or reduced-price online versions of books, supported by advertising — an approach adopted by newspapers on the Internet.

“We will have some interesting new business models on the market in 2009,” she said.

Free electronic versions of some books have been available for years. Project Gutenberg, a volunteer archival effort, makes more than 25,000 books available for download. Feedbooks, a start-up company in Paris, is formatting many of them for use on mobile devices.

There are limits to what readers can find on Feedbooks. George Orwell’s “1984,” for example, is available; the latest best sellers are not. That is because Project Gutenberg focuses on books whose copyrights have expired.

The Google settlement largely concerned works that were still under copyright but no longer in print. Digitizing these books could allow publishers to offer readers vast numbers of additional volumes — the so-called long tail of the Internet.

2008年11月3日 星期一

October Sky(Rocket Boys)十月的天空

你對照讀第一段 就知道 翻譯者 "中譯中" 或編輯改動處不少 幾乎是九成全譯
這可能是編輯
這本書大體翻譯得很好
可以改善之處 可能是
當初有許多專有名詞 沒參考"國立編譯館的學術名辭"
譬如說 tipple
以及採取完全不附原文之方式
中文本
108頁 on a roll 〔米話〕 (賭(か)け事などで)勝ち続きで; 幸運[つき]が続いて.
牧師不只是"滔滔不絕"
120頁 花當然不會長/開得"榮耀極了
這是俗稱"美豔"等...


on Page 133: "... "Consider this poem by William Ernest Henley," he said, opening a book and adjusting his glasses. "Ughhhh," Roy Lee growled, getting restless. I ..."

2. from Back Matter: "... an old timber with a book of poetry illuminated by his miner's lamp. Which poems he enjoyed there I am not certain, but of all of them that were blackened by coal, ..."


2007

Homer H. Hickam, 64, author of ''Rocket Boys,'' a memoir adapted for the movie ''October Sky.''

I was a high school sophomore in Coalwood, W. Va., and I read in the newspaper that Sputnik was going to fly over southern West Virginia. At the appointed hour, our neighbors came to our yard to help me watch it. My father said, ''Well, they can all go home because President Eisenhower will never allow anything Russian to fly over Coalwood!''

But at the appointed moment, Sputnik flew over Coalwood. If it had been God in his chariot that had flown over, I could not have been more impressed. It was awe-inspiring. Sputnik looked like a bright star that moved with such utter purpose that nothing could stop it; and I, in that moment, realized I wanted to be part of the movement into space. In that moment, I decided to get a job with Wernher von Braun.

I ended up having a 17-year career in NASA, as a designer of spacecraft and an astronaut training manager.







十月的天空(新版)
1999年初版 訂價沒變


/ CS132 October Sky(Rocket Boys)


閱讀分享討論區
作  者 | 希坎姆
譯  者 | 陳可崗
專家推薦 | 洪蘭,陽明大學神經科學研究所教授

《費城詢問報》

《聖地牙哥聯合論壇報》

《紐約時報》

《路易斯維爾觀察家》



1957年10月5日,蘇聯發射人類第一枚人造衛星「同路一號」,當時美國西維吉尼亞州的煤林鎮是一個逐漸凋零、死寂的小鎮。

面對茫茫未知的前途,桑尼在小小的心靈裡孵著一個夢:送火箭上太空。

擔 任煤礦場監督的父親對桑尼並沒有太大的期望,然而他的母親卻堅決要讓他從此擺脫煤塵瀰漫的灰濛煤林鎮。桑尼有一群同好,他們不屈不撓的研發與試射火箭,從 一開始用金屬廢料七拼八湊,到最後製造出結構精密的火箭,在這一路走來的奮鬥史中,充滿了青少年成長與實現夢想的歡笑與淚水,也展現出鍥而不舍的科學研究 精神。就在熊熊火箭衝破陰霾天空的剎那,桑尼與煤林鎮從此聲名遠播。

本書正是美國航太總署退休工程師桑尼‧希坎姆的回憶錄,他透過細膩的筆法,把衝突矛盾的親情、志同道合的友誼、春風化雨的師恩、情竇初開的戀愛交織成一部溫馨動人的故事。綿綿密密的情感像一縷絲線,不斷牽引讀者回到他的年少場景,去見證一趟築夢與逐夢的旅程。

希坎姆

生長於美國西維吉尼亞州煤林鎮,是一位退休的航太工程師,曾任職於美國國家航太總署十六年,至今仍擔任該機構的航太研發計畫顧問,現居於阿拉巴馬州亨次維 市(Huntsville)。他有多項著作,包括曾獲「每月一書俱樂部」推薦的軍事歷史名著《魚雷會合點》(Torpedo Junction),以及發表在《史密松航太期刊》(Smithsonian Air and Space)、《圖解美國歷史》(American History Illustrated)等刊物的多篇文章。新著小說《重回月球》(Back to the Moon)於一九九九年六月由狄拉可特出版公司發行。

陳可崗

生於廣州,成長於台灣最艱困時期,曾就讀海軍官校,台大物理系畢業,美國普度大學物理博士,主修實驗固態物理。曾任教於清華大學,後移居美國,任職電子工 程師。 工餘及退休後,輒常撰寫科學新知投刊於海外華文報紙,有〈量子電腦的發展〉、〈火星上生物之謎〉、〈大陸生態環境破壞的事實〉。 譯作有《十月的天空》、《觀念物理IV:聲學.光學》、《觀念物理V:電磁學.核物理》、《牛頓(上)-最後的巫師》、《牛頓(下)-科學第一人》、《數 學妖法》、《阿基米德幹了什麼好事!》、《質數魔力(上)-橫跨兩世紀的狂熱》、《質數魔力(下)-百萬美元大挑戰》、《居禮們:一個傳奇的家族》、《時 光旅人》(皆為天下文化出版)。

1-10 of 17 pages with references to song:

Return to book

1. on Page 16:
"... 16 / OCTOBER SKY continued to rock and hold me, still singing her quietly insistent song. No, you're not. ..."
2. on Page 32:
"... 32 / OCTOBER SKY song in my brain. Over and over again it played: Dorothy Plunk, Dorothy Plunk. THE Big Store steps was a favorite ..."
3. on Page 36:
"... Wernher von Braun. Dorothy Plunk. My song now had two names in it. When the papers printed that Sputnik was going to fly over southern West Virginia, ..."
4. on Page 78:
"... A popular song across the country in the late 1950's was Tennessee Ernie Ford's "Sixteen Tons," where he sang about a miner owing ..."
5. on Page 133:
"... hushed silence, it had been as loud as a rifle shot. "Now the cheerleaders will lead us in the school song," Mr. Turner ordered. The cheerleaders had been sitting together. ..."
6. on Page 140:
"... . . Only trouble is, gee whiz, he's dreaming his life away . . ." I laughed off Roy Lee's song, but it stung just the same. ..."
7. on Page 148:
"... Katydids sang their repetitive song in the evenings, and rabbits came down from the mountains to investigate the dozens of little tomato and lettuce farms ..."
8. on Page 190:
"... SKY were the football team. Then, when we ran up our BCMA flag, they began to sing the school fight song. "On, on, green and white, we are right for the fight tonight! ..."
9. on Page 221:
"... THE MACHINISTS / 221 nights, the bus warm with radiating bodies. A favorite song was "Tell Me Why." "Tell me why the stars do shine. ..."
10. on Page 274:
"... Although we didn't buy the Rezoid Royal Crown hair dressing that was hocked in between the songs, ..."
11. on Page 275:
"... music-to him it was "plinky- plunk and tacky"--and therefore so did we. He played a mixture of slow and fast songs, the fast ones played if they had a good beat. ..."
12. on Page 276:
"... 276 / OCTOBER SKY able songs interspersed with romantic interludes, and then the inevitable ending. So powerful was the selection that couples clung to one another ..."
13. on Page 278:
"... Ed often chose slow songs to get a couple back together. He was usually successful. I saw it more than once-the boy and girl, eyes ..."
14. on Page 279:
"... pink and blue lights and green and white crepe paper and began to dance to a booming Ed Johnson middle-act song, ..."
15. on Page 280:
"... We swayed to the song, and then Valentine's lips were brushing my ear and I wasn't really thinking about Dorothy and Jim anymore. ..."
16. on Page 298:
"... duty, and job. I stood alone on the side of the road and listened to my town play its industrial song. ..."
17. from Copyright:
"... payment for this "stripped book." It'szllJrn the Game by Charles Gates Dawes and Carl Sigman. Lyrics reprinted courtesy of Major Songs (ASCAP) c/o The Songwriters Guild of America 1951, and Warner Bros. ..."


1-10 of 14 pages with references to dream:

Return to book

1. on Page 125:
"... CAPE COALWOOD / 125 The Reverend was on a roll. "Sons, obey your fathers. But fathers, help your sons to dream. If they are confused, counsel them. If they stray, search them out and bring them home. ..."
2. on Page 139:
"... eye in my direction, he gave us a solo rendition of the Everly Brothers' "All I Have to Do Is Dream," with modi- fied lyrics: ..."
頁120
3. on Page 140:
"... 140 / OCTOBER SKY "Dream, dream, dream, all Sonny does is dream, dream, dream. When he wants Dorothy in his arms, when be wants her ..."
4. on Page 221:
"... but my heart still thumped wildly at the audacity of it. The bus rolled on, filled with dreams. DURING one of our study sessions in late November, ..."
5. on Page 281:
"... on the rail, his head hung over the water. I stopped beside his bulk as if I were in a dream. ..."
6. on Page 311:
"... have nothing to be-" but I fell into a deep sleep before he finished. It was a sleep packed with dreams of swirling colors, ..."
7. on Page 312:
"... "Been prayin' for you, boy," he said. "Knew you needed it." He told me then that he had had a dream. ..."
8. on Page 366:
"... Caton and Calvin Suggs alternately intruded into my dreams. Nothing seemed right, the world askew. THE newspapers said the strike at Coalwood was just one of many across the ..."
9. from Back Matter:
"... to fight for freedom across the world. I believed equally in both, so I volunteered for Vietnam, delaying my dream of working on spaceflight. ..."
10. from Back Matter:
"... i have-and to me the emptys seem like dreams i sometimes dream- of a girl-or munn~or maybe fame- my dreams have all returned the same, ..."
11. from Back Matter:
"... but by the vibrant love of an honorable people, and the instruction of a dear teacher, and the dreams of boys. ..."
12. from Back Cover:
"... West Virginia, was slowly dying. Faced with an uncertain future, Homer Hickam nurtured a dream: ..."
13. from Front Matter:
"... Fulfillment of a boy's dreams is what makes Rocket soar."-Chicago Tribune "[A] NOSTALGIC AND ENTERTAINING MEMOIR. ..."
14. from Front Matter:
"... "-Publishers Weekly (starred review) "A REFRESHINGLY HOPEFUL BOOK about personal triumph and achieving one's dreams, a book that can be recommended to all. . . . ..."

1-8 of 8 pages with references to bird:

Return to book

1. on Page 15:
"... she could reflect on her roses and bird feeders through the picture window the company carpenters had installed for her. Per her spec- ifications, it was angled so ..."
2. on Page 35:
"... looked over at Mom for support, but she was looking through the win- dow behind me. I supposed there were birds at her feeder. ..."
3. on Page 83:
"... aluminum tubing under the back porch that Dad had brought home from the mine to make a stand for Mom's bird feeders. I appropriated it with a clear con- science since ..."
4. on Page 104:
"... I named it Auk I, after the great auk, an extinct bird that couldn't fly. Quentin, for no apparent reason, had gone on and on the day before about extinct birds, so ..."
5. on Page 107:
"... Quentin and I were hiding be- hind, jerked twenty feet into the air, coughed once, and dropped like a dead bird. ..."
6. on Page 207:
"... up for the attention I had given the cat enemy upstairs. Then I went outside and scattered seeds for the birds on the picnic table and threw some old lettuce and carrots out for the rabbits. ..."
7. on Page 349:
"... WE DO THE MATH / 349 mouths open. So did we boys. If a flock of birds with a sense of humor had flown over at that moment, we might all have suffered. ..."
8. on Page 392:
"... a glossy light blue, about six inches wide, and painted on it was a big red cardinal, the West Virginia bird. ..."

2008年11月1日 星期六

莎士比亞的少女和婦人

莎士比亞的少女和婦人

作者
海涅
ISBN
9787532130580
頁數
203頁
開本
16開
出版社
上海文藝
出版日期
2007-1-1

 內容簡介  

《莎士比亞的少女和婦人》是兩位世界文化巨人思想碰撞的結晶。海涅由評莎劇女角生發,縱論文化與社會中的女性,剖析獨到,出人意想,同時進展亦莊亦諧的大師風采,亦使此書成為世界文化史上著名的莎士比亞研究成果之一。
 本書目錄  

一、引言
二、悲劇(之一)
三、悲劇(之二)
四、悲劇(之三)
五、喜劇(之一)
六、喜劇(之二)

博客來簡體館>take a LOOK>莎士比亞的少女和婦人

-


詩人綠原的書房

  春天來了。在中國詩壇這片綠色的原野上,至今辛勤耕耘著一位詩人:綠原。

  2月8日,立春不久。北京朝陽區八裡庄小區的普通樓房裡住著我國第一位獲斯特魯加國際詩歌節金環獎的這位詩人。

  詩人住4樓,房屋也很普通,住了20多年一直沒有裝修。老人、老伴和女兒住在一起,女兒平時照顧兩老,有時陪老人散步,一家人生活其樂融融。

  門廳較暗,一個書櫃放滿了書,用布帘罩著。

  書房不大,朝北,上午的光線還是充足的。西面的書櫃中,裝滿了書:中文的、英文的、德文的、俄文的,以詩歌為主。南面角落裡的書架也擠滿了書。

  書櫃前一張方桌,罩著花布。詩人夫人羅惠說,這是餐桌,我們在這屋吃飯。從臉上看詩人的生活很溫馨,花白頭發下的眼鏡后面,眼睛充滿笑意。“其實,我很喜歡做家務,最喜歡刷碗。”老人湖北口音很濃重,說完哈哈一笑。

  北窗前的寫字桌上擺滿了書,其中一本攤開著:《十九世紀文學主流(第二分冊)·德國的浪漫派》。詩人女兒劉若琴告訴記者,人民文學出版社將再版這套叢書,老人正在看這部由他翻譯的分冊有無修改之處。

   東面牆的書櫃邊是電腦桌,電腦打開著。從1999年起,詩人寫詩已開始使用電腦,拼音法輸入,還很熟練。電腦顯示:老人今年已寫了五六首詩了。“詩歌是 人類藝術的花朵,又是人類靈魂的花朵,我們生活著,有感、有悟,寫出來,就是詩。當然要能感染別人。”詩人說到詩卻是滿臉嚴肅。

  詩歌歌頌時代、歌頌季節,到處都是綠色的原野。

  

  綠原 原名劉仁甫,祖籍江西,1922年11月8日生於湖北黃陂。

   1942-1944年在重慶復旦大學外文系學習。解放前教授中學英文,解放初從事新聞工作,后調中宣部國際宣傳處。上世紀80年代就任人民文學出版社副 總編輯,現為中國作家協會名譽委員,中國詩歌學會副會長。著有詩集《童話》、《又是一個起點》、《人之詩》、《另一支歌》、《我們走向海》、《綠原自選 詩》等﹔著有文集《非花非霧集》、《苜蓿與葡萄》、《再談幽默》、《尋芳草集》、《半九別集》、《綠原說詩》等。主要譯作有《浮士德》、《裡爾克詩選》、 《請向內心走去》、《拆散的筆記簿》、《德國浪漫派》、《現代美學析疑》、《叔本華散文選》、《莎士比亞的少女和婦人》、莎士比亞新劇《愛德華三世和兩個 貴親戚》等。1998年獲斯特魯加國際詩歌節金環獎,2003年獲國際詩人筆會“中國當代詩魂金獎”,2004年獲頒文學藝術界首批“資深翻譯家”証書。 譯著《浮士德》1998年獲魯迅文學獎優秀文學翻譯彩虹獎。

  本報記者 潘衍習 許 涿攝影報道

《人民日報海外版》 (2007-02-12 第08版)

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